📘 TLC Guide Available
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► Addressing Current Events & Holding Difficult Conversations
The Impact of Critical Current Events
Critical current events that evoke feelings of fear, uncertainty, or any sense of harm among those in our community can have significant and adverse impacts on teaching and learning. Research demonstrates that students, instructors, and TAs do not need to be directly involved in a harmful situation to experience anxiety and trauma.
Why Difficult Conversations About Current Events Matter
- Purposeful, educator-guided classroom dialogues in a supportive learning environment can help students to critically process and contextualize current events that carry emotional weight or controversy.
- A report by the Leonore Annenberg Institute for Civics (Jonathon et al., 2011) also demonstrates that students generally appreciate it when their teaching team acknowledges or discusses traumatic events, recognizing that learning happens in the context of lived experiences, both historical and contemporary. How we structure discussions around critical current events matters to both instructors’ and students’ well-being.
Approaches to Addressing Current Events
The TLC Guide to Addressing Current Events & Holding Difficult Conversations offers a five-step pedagogical approach to teaching in these situations, which includes:
- Pause and self-reflect in order to process our own emotions and reflect on how our identities and experiences shape the perspectives we hold before taking action with students.
- Acknowledge current events at the beginning of class as a small but meaningful way to signal awareness, compassion, and empathy, and to demonstrate a recognition that we are living through difficult times and that some of us are suffering deeply.
- (Re-)establish or strengthen the learning community by establishing or revisiting community agreements in order to affirm the diverse lived experiences of students.
- (Re-)calibrate your classroom for critical discourse by considering pedagogical wellness in your lesson plans, providing skills and practice for student dialogue, and transforming contentious current event topics into teachable moments.
- Connect with campus support services and encourage students to do so as well when navigating challenging situations.
TLC Guide to Addressing Current Events & Holding Difficult Conversations
The TLC Guide to Addressing Current Events & Holding Difficult Conversations offers strategies for establishing and sustaining an inclusive learning community that supports students during times of crisis. It also attends to instructors’ and TAs’ well-being, which involves accounting for how each person’s positionality will shape their instructional choices.
Additional Resources
The Facing History & Ourselves Fostering Civil Discourse- Difficult Classroom Conversations in a Diverse Democracy Guide offers detailed tools and teaching strategies to support teachers in having meaningful, productive conversations with students about controversial issues and current events.
University of Michigan’s Interrupting Bias Guide, Strategies for Managing Hot Moments Guide, and How to Apologize Guide all offer teaching strategies and sample language for engaging with students around controversial topics in the classroom.
Brown University’s Microaggressions & Micro-affirmations Guide defines various types of microaggressive behaviors and offers pedagogical suggestions for how teachers can successfully navigate these as classroom learning opportunities.
Harvard’s Calling In and Calling Out Guide provides actionable guidance for how to compassionately bring attention to and discuss the impact of harmful words or behavior.
See Also
Trauma-aware and Wellness-oriented Teaching Practices
Community Building in the Classroom
Critical Incidents on Campus & in the Classroom